Congress Quietly Passes New Rule Allowing House Members To Hide Records From Ethics Probes

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deray mckesson ?@deray 10m10 minutes ago
Congress Quietly Passes New Rule Allowing House Members To Hide Records From Ethics Probes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/secret-new-rule-allows-house-members-to-hide-records-from-ethics-probes_us_58746aefe4b099cdb0ff34eb

Just when you thought ethics standards couldn’t get much worse on Capitol Hill... It’s emerged that the House GOP quietly changed a rule last week to allow members to keep their records hidden from ethics or criminal investigations.

The tweak allows politicians to conceal any information members produce — even suspicious expenditures and budgets — if the Office of Congressional Ethics or the Department of Justice investigates them for criminal activity, the Center for Responsive Politics reports.

The change essentially makes a member of Congress the owner and sole controller of any records he or she creates, regardless of whether those documents touch on a public interest, such as use of taxpayer funds or the commission of a crime.

“Records created, generated, or received by the congressional office of a Member … are exclusively the personal property of the individual member … and such Member … has control over such records,” the regulation states.

The change granting records control to members was passed without much notice amid news of a plan to gut the independence of the Office of Congressional Ethics, which caused a public outcry but failed to pass.

Under the new regulation, a lawmaker being investigated for misuse of taxpayer funds, for example, might now assert the privilege to withhold spending records from law enforcement authorities. Had that measure existed earlier, certain accounts might not have been accessible for corruption investigations that resulted in charges against members of Congress.

“Why on earth would Congress now create barriers to investigation and subpoenas of a member’s spending records?” Center for Responsive Politics Sheila Krumholz executive director said to the Fiscal Times Monday. “This only benefits the incumbent politicians who passed this rule and those who would flout it, not the system and certainly not the public.”

Allowing House members to block access to their records destroys the “critical element of independent oversight” over government records and members’ activities, she added.

read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/secret-new-rule-allows-house-members-to-hide-records-from-ethics-probes_us_58746aefe4b099cdb0ff34eb

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1. posting w/original title to get more views

[Bettie]

2. Wow, so they're just openly admitting they are crooked

and there will be no questions or investigations about it, because they don't wanna.

[global1]

3. Does This Apply Only To The House Or....

does it include the Senate as well?

Is this a form of payback in order to support the Repugs?

[malaise]

4. RETHUGs in name

and nature

[Cha]

5. Sounds they have big plans.

[Javaman]

7. yup, they are going steal and sell everything that ins't nailed down.

and we won't know about a damn thing until it's way to late.

welcome to our cartoon democracy

[BSdetect]

6. Another subversive fascist move

Why not just make a new class of immune to prosecution GOP members?

[MineralMan]

8. They're a bunch of crooks, protecting themselves from exposure.

This needs to be widely publicized. Shame on those people!

[keithbvadu2]

9. So their current day Dennis Hasterts could hide their child molesting.

So their current day Dennis Hasterts could hide their child molesting.

Apparently they feel they need this law.

[SHRED]

10. They must be planning to break laws

Why else would they do this?

[SHRED]

11. Where are the Democrats?

Why aren't they raising heck about this?

[librechik]

12. all part of the plan--Thanks Putin!

all of these Republican bastards are fine with the coup, as long as they get their misogynist, racist agenda at last.

How can anyone fight this illegal regime?

[lsewpershad]

13. These clowns

don't realize that they are not going to be there forever?

[BSdetect]

14. K&R

This is atrocious. An atrocity by any definition.

[bigtree]

15. »

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. OpenSecrets points out how this would affect the Schock case

Schock was indicted for wire fraud, making false statements and filing false federal income tax returns, among other charges. Before his indictment, the Justice Department and Schock’s lawyers battled over who held control over his MRA records (members’ representational allowance, or office financial documents, which includes tallies of expenditures for redecorating): Congress, or Schock himself.

At first, the court rejected Schock’s “act of production” privilege, saying “the congressional office was a collective entity” and thus had no right to claim the Fifth. But it later reversed the ruling and gave the government time to reconsider, “given the importance of the issue…and the unprecedented consequence…to Schock and therefore all current and future Members of Congress as to their publicly-funded, non-private, public or official Congressional records,” according to a government court record.

Prosecutors in the case were not pleased.

“They ask this Court to be the first court to recognize that Schock and every other current and future Member of Congress have a Fifth Amendment act-of-production privilege, thereby effectively screening [public or official documents] from public scrutiny,” prosecutors in Schock’s case wrote in a court document in Aug. 2015. “The government respectfully submits that this argument is repugnant to the fundamental principle that no man is above the law and that it should therefore be rejected.”

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/01/house-rules-change-didnt-hear-about/